Microsoft addiction.

[vernon]

There's a very good reason for not using Microsoft Office if you are an organisation with lots of computers. My school would have to pay around £12,000 per annum to license a current version of MS Office on all of its computers. StarOffice, and, soon to be Office Libre has been the Office Suite used by my school to deliver the curriculum ICT needs. The only failing is the lack of a decent database so MS Access has been retained.

The only facility missing that staff have complained about is the inability to play MS Powerpoint slides with embedded Flash animations - not a great loss as most of the animations were poor and were eye candy rather than being educational.

Staff that complain about being unable to do particular tasks with the spreadsheet and word applications are usually shooed away after I ask them to show me how they do it on MS Office on a lap top retained for the occasional compatibility problem and they can not demonstrate how they achieved it on MS Office.

Someone on the senior management team buckled and bought licenses for MS Office 2010 to be installed on staff lap tops. Only thirty staff out of 120 have 'upgraded' and I have heard most of them complaining about the interface and the difficulty in doing simple tasks.

The kids are far more adaptable. They have taken to the software like ducks to water and only a few have commented upon the fact that it's no Microsoft software.

 

[Davidc]

There's only one person being unreasonable there, Davidc.

Don't agree. Given the number of copies being sold, the development cost of new versions, and their ability to charge for support £25 would still provide them with a massive profit.

I've looked at the latest MS office and can see absolutely no beneficial changes from MSO 2003, just a further deterioration in the user interface. So far the desirable differences I've seen in OO 3.3 are much greater, particularly its speed and import handling, and much better user interface. The only drawback so far is that it can't convert Excel macros so existing spreadsheets with them in will have to go on using Excel. A quick test showed that unsurprisingly this is true the other way round as well. I'm going to have to put a slide show together by Friday, I'll see how that goes but from a look this morning I can't see it being a problem either.

Microsoft have ripped off the world for long enough. I'm sure that if Open Source and with it a free market are successful then Microsoft will in the end have to sell products in true competition with others. That should reduce their prices to an acceptable level.